Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS)

Overview

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. Our customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders in many sectors. The company operates with 1200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office-based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution. The company is founder-led, profitable, and growing.

We are hiring an engineering manager to lead the reboot of our Landscape systems management solution for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is growing rapidly in the enterprise, with estates expanding from cloud, to bare metal servers, to vSphere clusters, and of course desktops and devices. Ubuntu is easy to deploy and configure, one node at a time, but it's difficult to know where you stand on policy and compliance, patch management, or access control across a large estate. Ubuntu used to be under the radar in the enterprise, but it is now becoming an official platform for many companies. Those enterprises very much want a high quality way to manage their Ubuntu estate.

We started work on Landscape many years ago, and the current generation of the service reflects the choices of the day. We now have the opportunity to invest significantly in a team to bring a fresh new vision for large-scale Ubuntu estate management to the project. That doesn't make this a greenfield opportunity — we have a system that serves thousands of deployments — but we know we want to step back and give it a big new push, letting go of some things that are no longer so important, and embracing a range of new priorities. This role is the critical engineering leadership role for that mission.

Today we use Python, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, HAProxy, and have a ReactJS front end. In other web services projects we use more Golang these days. Our next wave of Landscape engineering is an opportunity to raise the bar on SAAS and on-prem solution technologies, architectures, patterns and operations. Our goal is to make it easy for enterprises to own a few Landscape instances that serve their global estate, and to be able to apply policy and know intuitively where they stand — globally — in a very complex world of mixed Ubuntu versions, substrates and flavours.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of engineers in your region
• Develop talent through coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands-on career development
• Demonstrate sound engineering principles and directly contribute toward your team's goals
• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, management, and external stakeholders
• Lead modern, agile software development practices
• Ensure a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
• Build automated, highly reliable image delivery, testing and publication pipelines
• Engage with many other teams at Canonical, as well as the open source community and commercial partners
• Work from home with global travel 4-6 weeks per year for internal and external events

Valued Skills and Experience

What we offer colleagues

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open-source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence; in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since our inception in 2004. Working here is a step into the future and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer

We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.

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